Addressing the elephant in the room

Moore victory better be a wake up call to establishment Republicans

On Tuesday Alabama killed two birds with one stone. The voted to drain the swamp. To send the establishment candidate that had the backing of Mitch McConnell and surprisingly Donald Trump.

Roy Moore, a former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court who was removed from office for his display of a Ten Commandments statue, on Tuesday defeated incumbent Senator Luther Strange, capturing almost 55 percent of the vote.

This should be a lesson for Trump who had supported Strange reportedly at the advice of his son-in-law Jared Kushner. Trump is normally a guy who trust his guts and instincts it seems he was misled in this race and better learn quickly that the American Public is fed up with the establishment. Part of the allure after all of Trump is his talk of draining the swamp. In this case he endorsed the swamp.

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Trump had campaigned for Strange in Alabama and sent Twitter messages urging fellow Republicans to vote for him. But Trump’s base in this case was more in tune with who the anti-establishment candidate was and voted Moore.

Trump’s reply today was “spoke to Roy Moore of Alabama last night for the first time. Sounds like a really great guy who ran a fantastic race, Trump said in a tweet Wednesday. Several of Trump’s previous tweets in support of Strange were deleted from his account Tuesday night.

Alabama voters sent a strong rebuke to Republican leaders in Congress, with Moore pledging to try to unseat McConnell. Both Moore and Strange said they would back the president’s agenda, but Moore has shown a willingness to go farther. His spokesman told MSNBC he opposed the GOP’s latest health-care legislation, backed by Trump, because it didn’t go far enough in undoing Obamacare.

“We have to return to the knowledge of God and the Constitution of the United States to the United States Congress,” Moore told supporters at his victory party Tuesday night, according to the Associated Press.

Moore will go on to face Democrat Doug Jones, a former U.S. attorney, in a Dec. 12 special election. Jones faces an uphill battle in Alabama, which last elected a Democratic senator in 1990. Strange was appointed to the Senate seat in February when Trump picked former Senator Jeff Sessions to be attorney general.

The second bird Alabama killed Tuesday is Tennessee Senator Bob Corker another establishment candidate and McConnell lapdog. Corker announced hours after election results were in from Alabama that he would not seek re-election in 2018.